The way through is through

Somehow we find our way.

Hi, friends! Today’s essay is a special one. While I’m away on vacation with my family, my dear friend Meredith is in the writer’s seat. Meredith was one of the first parents I met when we moved back to Atlanta in 2021, and our connection has always felt a bit like magic. Our daughters, less than a year apart, adore each other — just as Meredith and I love each other’s company.

Among the many things I admire about Meredith is how she makes space for creativity in her life. She’s a beautiful painter, a thoughtful website maker, and — as you’ll soon see — a wonderful writer.

This essay is, on the surface, about parenting. But there’s something deeper we can all relate to, no matter what our days look like. We are all making it up as we go along, trying to find our way with limited directions, hoping we’ll recognize the right path when it opens up before us. Meredith just launched her own Substack, so if her words resonate, be sure to follow along.

I hope you enjoy this piece as much as I did.

xoxo
KHG

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Atlanta’s famed Krog Street Tunnel (Getty Images)

“Mommy, are we turning right or left?”

We are stopped at a red light, poised to turn onto the highway.

Maeve is buckled into her rear-facing car seat directly behind me. She’s tall for three, more than tall enough to face forward. But as her risk-averse, first-time Pandemic Parents, my husband and I tend to err on the side of caution. For now, I look ahead and Maeve looks behind, and we both have rear-view mirrors so we can see one another’s faces.

“We’re turning right,” I say. Maeve vaguely seems to grasp the concept of left and right, but I’m pretty sure explaining it while we’re facing opposite directions and looking though not one but two mirrors will confuse both of us. Especially because I think she is really asking me something else.

Where are we going? How do we get there?

The light turns green, and I turn right, accelerating to match the flow of traffic.

“Mommy, too BRIGHT!” Maeve whines. A glimpse through our pair of mirrors shows me the sun in her eyes. I feel myself grind my teeth. I’m the captain and navigator, in charge and responsible for this breach of comfort, but some things are beyond my control—either to screw up or to fix.

“The sun’s in your face. I’m so sorry, babe. I can’t do anything about that. The road will turn up ahead, and the light will change.”

And it does. The road bends a few moments later, and the sun no longer hits her face. She recognizes the interchange as we approach Atlanta’s downtown connector through a tunnel. While sun glare may annoy an indignant toddler, tunnels have the opposite effect.

“Tunnel! How many tunnels and how many bridges?” she demands. Bubbling over, she answers herself: “There will be green bridges and brown bridges! Then three tunnels, and a BIG tunnel before Cici’s house!”

My mom, or Cici as Maeve calls her, first pointed them out on a drive to her house in the suburbs. Now Maeve gleefully anticipates them when driving through downtown, somehow memorizing each tunnel and overpass in order. Maeve calls one the Tiny Tunnel because it’s very short but has lights; I have gathered that lights are the requisite feature of a tunnel.

Before we even start the car, Maeve asks if we will be going through tunnels. There are a few local streets with overpasses or a brief tunnel under train tracks. Rest assured, Maeve has taken note and would like every trip to use these routes, please and thank you. Except she doesn’t say please and thank you; she aggressively asks in a loud, high-pitched voice. (Ok, she yells at me.)

I’ve begun blaming Siri if GPS says the fastest route involves boring roads without tunnels, and sometimes I can appease Maeve if I point out that we’re crossing a bridge going over the highway. Sometimes she just whines more, despite the fact that the pediatrician or preschool or grocery store (or a million other destinations) may just be in a different, tunnel-less direction.

Where are we going? Why are we going this way?

It’s 2013, pre-child, pre-smartphone. My husband and I have just moved to Nashville. In an effort to learn my way around, I’ve ventured outside our neighborhood to run errands across town. I’ve printed Mapquest directions, now sitting beside me on the passenger seat. Future-me is quite proud of the effort I put into this afternoon of errands just so I can learn my way around—finding each store’s address, determining the most efficient order, plugging in each leg of the trip for its own set of directions, and printing them out to follow as I drive—without Siri directing me in real-time. Future-me probably would not bother leaving my house if I had to do that much work to go somewhere new. But I’m young, footloose, and childfree. This is going to be an adventure.

I’ve successfully navigated to Lowe’s, then the mall, and now I’m headed to a Target that is not the closest one to my house (I know, ambitious). Exploring new ground is the theme of today’s adventure, and I’m committed; that is, I’m winning caveman navigation until an ambulance whirs up behind me, sirens blaring and lights flashing. The only way to pull over is to enter a turn-only lane for an earlier intersection than I intended. When movement resumes, I’m stuck and the left arrow turns green.

I have no choice but to go off-book and abandon my printed directions. Because this is Nashville, a hilly city with winding roads that defy a grid system outside of central downtown, I can’t just go around the block to undo this improvised development. I’m in uncharted territory, an unplanned detour, and I just have to see where this road takes me. I must be aggravating the driver behind me as I slow down and try to read road names, but I keep going.

Somehow I manage to keep my general sense of direction and figure out a way to Target. I celebrate with a bag of M&Ms at check-out and successfully follow my printed directions home, quite proud of my new mental map and successful quest. Of getting lost and finding my way.

A year later I will graduate to a smartphone with GPS, and I will navigate Nashville with such ease that I’ll laugh at my Mapquest antics (how antiquated! how earnest!). I will plug in a destination for neighborhoods and cities that are completely new to me, and I will be comfortable going through unfamiliar places—essentially lost without feeling lost at all. What a wonder it will be.

We’ll go on an adventure. We’ll find our way home.

Maeve is two months old, and we are at the beginning of pandemic lockdown, when everyone thinks this will be a short, two-week disruption. Even in the postpartum mush of my brain, where words and time are still bruised and muddled, something deep inside me knows this will last for months, probably years. My family thinks I’m being anxious, ridiculous; their dismissal makes me more anxious, more ridiculous. Soon they understand.

I take solace in our home, noticing how each room feels more “lived in” than all the years before a baby joined us. I try to find silver linings. Working from home, my husband has more time with our infant than we ever expected. On the screened-in-porch, we listen to birds; in the kitchen, we dance. I thank our walls for standing around us, sheltering us from an invisible virus we do not yet understand. I thank the etched glass window on our back door for letting in the setting sunlight, casting flashes of rainbows on the walls, floor, and my daughter’s face and toes. As the spring warms, I will thank our yard and our house’s previous owners for planting the smells that take turns floating in the air: the jasmine, the gardenias, and the fragrant tea olive shrubs that bloom repeatedly throughout the year.

On this day in March, I step into the backyard, where the trees are just beginning to turn green. I am wearing Maeve on my chest in the baby carrier, her sleeping head resting just below my chin. I pull out my phone and set the camera to video, pointing it at myself, arm outstretched. I see the dark spots of pregnancy melasma still dotting my forehead and cheeks. I see Maeve’s full head of dark hair, matching mine; hers has not yet grown out into the dirty-blond of her father’s, and mine is still dark and thick from pregnancy hormones. I slowly begin turning in a circle. Maeve and I remain still in the center of the frame, but spinning behind us I see the trees, the tea olives, my parked car with nowhere to go, our house with its optimistically yellow back door. I am spinning a cocoon, casting a spell—the enchantment of tunnel vision, where our world will be limited to this scope, this safe, light-filled place. Home is good.

I look down and smell Maeve’s head as I kiss it. She stirs but doesn’t wake.

The road will turn, and the light will change. Can we stay here a while?

Maeve, in her element. (Meredith Eastburn)

Maeve is two-and-a-half, and she woke up with a cold (again) and an idea. She wants to paint some paper and make tunnels for her toy cars.

“Momby,” she says, congested, handing me a tempera paint stick. “Open dis pwease?” I pop the cap off and twist the paint upward. I hand it back, and she begins to make marks on her paper with beautiful abandon—purple swirls and green dashes, quick orange dots and slow black, yellow, and pink layers.

After many colors and several pages, she decides she is finished. I admire that about her, so easily knowing when she is through with a material and when she has reached the end of a piece. Not planning where she was going, but knowing when she had arrived.

I fetch some tape while she collects her cars. I fold the edges back on each page and then arch the pages and tape them to the floor in a long row. Tunnels.

“Momby, it’s Kwog Stweet Tunnel!” Maeve exclaims.

Krog Street boasts an iconic graffiti-covered tunnel that we often pass through on our walks. It’s known for its colorful walls, flooding during heavy rains, and offering one of the few ways across a long section of train tracks that bisect several city neighborhoods. But maybe Maeve understands it better. Rather than seeing it as a hurdle, traffic nuisance, or way to get from one place to another place, she simply experiences it. The tunnel’s colors, darkness, shapes, sounds, and movement are for noticing, absorbing, imagining.

The way through is through.

I show her how to position her car before the tunnels, roll it backwards to wind it up, and release it to zip forward. She sends it through, and it hits a tunnel wall. She tries again. This one misses the tunnels altogether.

“Detour!” I say. She tries again, narrating the directions to herself.

Line it up.

Pull it back.

Let it go. ZOOM!

“Momby, what’s a detour?”

I scan my brain quickly for an explanation befitting a two-year-old. “A detour is when you go a different way.”

How do we get there? There’s more than one way.

I’m 42. My hair is thinning, graying at a rate both too fast to seem fair and too slow to look striking. Instead, I’m trying to embrace this frizzy, frazzled look, which pairs well with parenting a five-year-old, when days are long, and 4-7 p.m. is longer. But months, however, evaporate while I sleep, and suddenly my child has grown two inches and correctly says “forehead” instead of “headfore.” She asks questions like, “Who was my mommy when you were a baby?” and, “How will you still love me in heaven?”

I blink slowly as though the backs of my eyelids might offer answers.

Sometimes parenting feels like the MapQuest days—offering a general sense of where I’m going but lacking real-time help. No one is tipping me off about detours or highlighting which lane to use, like when my toddler decides she’s retiring from naps. Being a grownup means I should just know how to teach the concepts of time and distance, or what to say when my child shares that a friend was “over her” and didn’t want to play.

Other days, parenting feels like driving a clown car filled with backseat drivers—all the parenting “resources” of social media and the internet talking to me simultaneously, warning me of the Biggest Mistakes I’m making as a mother, wife, or woman.

I cannot please everyone, but I am also a walking sales-pitch, anticipating my toddler’s tipping points, treading lightly, and steering through irrational small-human moods while also trying to run errands, be on time, and magically pack everything we might need.

Maybe I’ll eventually help her develop a sense of direction, though I have no idea how. Maybe one day I’ll have a totally agreeable child who understands my concern, my efforts, my protection, my love, my navigation skills. We will get lost, but we’ll find our way.

The only way through is through.

Maeve is one. We’re on a stroller walk in the neighborhood when I notice something written on a driveway. At first I think it’s chalk or spray paint, but when I stop and look more closely, I can see that someone has used a pressure-washer to write “HOME” at the end of their driveway. The words amount to an erasure of dust and dirt built up on the surface over time. A “you are here” map label, a final destination, coordinates for a place where I imagine someone loves and is loved, only made visible and brought into relief by the dirt and imperfections around it.

I snap a picture and we walk the long way home.